What the hell is up with that?

In an attempt to work through my thoughts I am going to try and keep this going.  What is "this"?  It’s me sharing my thougts.  Since I don’t have a shrink and most of you don’t know certain things about me I figured what better way to concrete our friendships than to "share".  Actually I am just really bored and hope that this might help me break through a writers block.

When I say that I am not sure what
I am doing I really mean it. I have no
idea why I act, talk, or exist the way I do. In “Back to the Future” Michael J. Fox played a high school student
bored with the public education. His
only true friend was some nutty professor type.  Fox travels back in time determined to unite
his parents or risk erasure of his future thus himself by making out with his
mother. I’ve spent my life sitting,
walking, running, basically moving through thoughts trying to create my future
thus myself and never once thought of making out with my mom. My life is also not a film. I always wanted it to be though.

 When I was really young I wanted to
be like Indiana Jones or Michael Douglas in “Romancing the Stone”. It wasn’t their manhood I wanted to
embody. It was their lifestyles. I wanted to run around the world and play in
the dirt or fly a plane into a jungle only to wreck it and survive unscathed. My escape was through movies. I spent a lot of time watching these films
and never once thinking that they weren’t really in India but on location in Mexico. Where ever they were it was still better than
where I was. 

 I spent the “better” part of my life
in the same basic area. I went to school
with the same people year after year. I
would get excited when I heard: “Suzy
moved to Dallas this summer. Her dad got a new job”. Then I would think to myself “what does Dallas
look like”. I would imagine a place that
I couldn’t imagine. I wanted to go
further than Myrtle Beach or Charleston
when my family would take trips and was jealous to hear in august when school
started that the Wellington’s trip
consisted of seven different flights over three continents. I didn’t want to be a Wellington
I just wanted to travel like one.

 Then came high school and I wanted
to be the kid everyone was talking about. You know the one who graduated and did something grand with their
life. At first I figured it would be the
lawyer or the doctor but it never really made me happy when I thought about it. I wanted to do something even better. When I heard: “Hey, did you hear about
______? They moved to Thailand to help raise motherless Bengal Tigers!” I would feel something change inside of me. Instead of being happy for the person or even
the tiger I would loathe their existence. “I could do that.” I would think to myself. I waited way too long to go save that motherless
tiger.

 In college I realized I was free to
travel anywhere and do anything. This
was great except for one thing. I didn’t
know how to travel. It’s not like baking
a cake or learning the English language. What the hell was I supposed to do? I never traveled like a Wellington.  My grandfather was a salesman and traveled
quite extensively but most of the time he chose a car as his mode. I on the other hand, when traveling any
farther than the southeast, used my VCR. All I knew was that airports were where people ran through terminals to
catch the love of their life from taking that flight. Train stations were a place you risked life
and limb to hop a train for a kiss and buses always pulled away with your love
on the other side. . The truth of the matter was that Airports
were streamed with security and anyone caught running was easily deemed
a security threat and bus and train stations were always in a “bad” part of
town.

Money was another factor. I didn’t exactly spend my money on the best
things. Instead of saving for a trip I
would party it away or buy some form of electronics that would allow me to
escape immediately. I had my priorities
all screwed up. I was content with
learning about these places but had no true drive to get there. I was living through everyone else and
feeling jealous because of it. I wanted
to do something more than see the “Sphinx” at putt-putt. I wanted to go to Egypt and see the real deal.   I wanted to know if the itch
from an Amazon mosquito bite differed from that of one in Pisgah forest. Screw lions at the zoo. Where’s the fun if it you can’t watch it take
down a small herd of African Water Buffalo. I felt like Jimmy Stuart in "It’s a Wonderful Life".  This didn’t work for me as a child and it sure as hell didn’t work for
me as an adult. It wasn’t until I was
twenty two that I took my first big trip.

 I set out with who was then the
“love of my life”. The idea was to see
as much as we could in a little over a month. It was amazing. We lived out of
her truck and camped in some fashion almost every night. It was a life changing experience, one that
stuck with me and became a very important catalyst in the “chain reaction” that is my life. I realized on that trip that I
was happiest when moving. The idea of
being in a new place the following day or even a matter of hours excited
me. How much distance could we fit into
one day? I felt free. The only decision I had to make was where to
go next. In between the target stops
there was so much to see. Why not bypass
that and try this route. It was simply
intoxicating. I knew people that left
their town never looking back. I admired
something about this. I don’t know
exactly what it was that I admired. Was
it the fact that they ventured off or what they did after the adventure began? Whatever
it was it built to a point that I couldn’t ignore anymore.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 1:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.